Owner of IsAnybodyDown seems to have impersonated a woman to get nude photos.

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Earlier this month, "revenge porn" entrepreneur Craig Brittain sat for an on-camera interview with CBS4-Denver, where he explained how his website IsAnybodyDown is nothing more than "entertainment." Brittain's site shows nude pictures of people, mostly women, without their consent, along with their personal contact info. The website advertises links to a service called "Takedown Hammer" which promises to get victims off the site if they pay $250. Many assume the "Hammer" is Brittain, since its e-mails come from the same IP address; Brittain denies it. In any case, to many of the victims, Brittain's site looks like a simple extortion scheme.

Now, Brian Maass, the same CBS4 reporter who investigated Brittain in that piece, has a new piece up in which he may have caught Brittain in an even more serious lie. Late Friday, CBS4 broadcast Maass' interview with a woman who met another woman on Craigslist named "Jess Davis." Davis corresponded and sent nude photos of herself, and she asked the other woman to send her racy photos in return. Davis also asked for her date of birth and phone number, saying she was looking to have "just some fun." The victim went along with the exchange, believing she was interacting with a woman.

Five days later, the woman's photos were on IsAnybodyDown, along with her contact info. "This is something I didn't want all of the world to see," she told Maass in the interview, in which her face and voice were obscured.

Turns out, the e-mails from jessdavis877@gmail.com came from the same IP address as Craig Brittain's e-mails—just like e-mails from the "Takedown Lawyer" named "David Blade III," which also apparently originated at Brittain's Colorado Springs home.

If Brittain created fake identities to acquire womens' photos and then posted them online himself, it's pretty clear that he won't be protected by the federal law that he believes shields him currently, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. That law protects website owners from liability for material posted by their users in certain situations. An attorney who speaks with Maass in the new piece says that by creating fake identities to populate his site with new photos, Brittain's behavior enters the criminal realm.

Brittain—who sat for an hour-long interview with Maass as recently as a few weeks ago—was nowhere to be found for this piece. CBS4 repeatedly contacted him about the "Jess Davis" revelations but got no response.

While Brittain may have gone fishing (or "catfishing" as the case may be) for nude photos on Craigslist, at least some of the victims on Brittain's site appear to have been betrayed by ex-lovers. That's a pattern that appears to have been repeated elsewhere, and it has spawned the name "revenge porn." The practice of posting nude photos of people against their will has also been called "humiliation porn" or simply "involuntary porn."

Brittain Uncut: Blaming victims, who “want people to see”

The full, uncut interview of Craig Brittain from the last interview has also been posted online, in twoparts. In it, Brittain maintains that all the pictures originate with voluntary submissions. Brittain makes some statements about his site that beggar belief, calling it a "safe environment" that offers a "completely neutral" portrayal of the people in the photos. "Whereas some of these other sites are disparaging, or they're shaming,.. our site is a completely neutral portrayal of the people. Just the images, that's all we show."

"You're saying, all those people want to be on your website?" asks Maass.

"I would say so," answers Brittain. "I would suggest they want people to see their pictures... What they don't want is some of the shame, some of the discrimination from people. I would suggest they took the pictures, they obviously want people to see them. They sent a lot of them to random strangers that they had never met."

"How do you know they sent them to random strangers?" asks Maass.

"Craigslist is very popular," says Brittain. "They'll send e-mails to 20, or 30 people like it's nothing. Not a lot of background checks. They don't even know who they're sending the pictures to. They'll just send them out. And in turn, a lot of those people will forward those pictures to us."

Whether or not they "support the website itself," the people in the photos "want to be seen," he insists.

"I think they want somebody to see the pictures, but they didn't want you to see, or the world to see," notes Maass.

"There's some ambiguity there," responds Brittain. "Not every case is the same."

As for women who say their pictures were sent by an ex-lover, Brittain gets very close to calling them liars.

"I'm suggesting they're bending the truth," he says. "They have a tendency to paint things in their own way. It's not so easy to admit, hey, I was out looking for a casual hookup and I sent these to a stranger. It's a lot easier to say, oh, I sent these to an ex-boyfriend."

At points in the interview, Brittain makes the incredible assertion that he actually has a positive "social goal" of removing the shame and stigma associated with nude photos.

"We actually think the fact they're taking these pictures is a good thing, and an acceptable thing," he says. "We're not trying to shame them or scrutinize them. We're trying to entertain the world. And also to take away a lot of the stigma that's associated with this, because we don't believe these people should be shamed. It may be tough for some of the first people that have been posted. But as time goes on and this gets bigger, this will become more and more of an acceptable thing in society."

Later in the interview, when Maass suggests that he is "takedown lawyer" David Blade III, Brittain immediately answers that he is not.

"Are you saying that David Blade is a real person?" asks Maass. "Nobody can find him."

"I don't know. I don't know if David Blade is a real person or not," says Brittain. "I post what people pay me to post, in terms of advertising."

"How is he paying you?"

"Ah, PayPal. The contact pays me through PayPal. His name is James. He's the guy that is behind Takedown Hammer, and a lot of the stuff that's up, as a contact. That's the guy I talk to, and then they have a team, who does all the work."

89 Reader Comments

I like boobs as much as the next guy, but this isn't right. This guy and his defenders are complete scumbags. Additionally, how is this not considered blackmail?

The difference here is that he's actually admitted to being involved in the activity coming from the IP address (his emails), do you're stuck arguing that the "takedown hammer" emails are having the IP address altered.

Possible, but I find it much more likely that he is operating the "service" by which his site extracts revenue rather than that the victims of his site are going through those technological hoops to "frame" him. Definitely preponderance of evidence, though obviously I'd need more to eliminate reasonable doubt. In a civil trial, though? Yeah, he'd be toast, as he should be.

And I suspect that when the authorities start digging they may find enough evidence for a criminal trial as well.

But still a good point. An IP address alone is hardly evidence. But what we have here is not an IP address alone.

This dude is actually teaching people something. If you don't want naked photo's of you out in the wild, don't take them, and especially don't send them if you do to ANYONE!

He deserves an honorary degree.

Poe's Law.

This guy is a sociopath (and a tool) and deserves to be punished severely -- he either sees nothing wrong with what he's doing, or he's doing it for money with full disregard for anyone he harms in the process.

People like him are why we can't have nice things.

If he's a sociopath, the vast majority of everyone qualifies for sociopathy.

I have found myself wondering recently if current mainstream economic thinking has somehow seeded a generation of near-sociopaths. This in that they are not sociopaths in the clinical sense, but approach interactions, especially when they are economic interactions, with strangers in ways that are very similar to a sociopath.

sociopath - noun Psychiatry.a person with a psychopathic personality whose behavior is antisocial, often criminal, and who lacks a sense of moral responsibility or social conscience.

Just because Brittain may be acting without morals in the context of this website, doesn't mean that he has the psychiatric condition known as sociopathy. In fact, I would postulate that true sociopaths would not be able to function as well as even Brittain does in today's society.

You know, this coming so soon after the Singapore nude scam article (and the comments ranging from "meh" to "asia is so conservative" to variations on "it's their own fault for being ugly, otherwise they wouldn't mind their nudes out there"), I thought people a little more circumspect with the white knightery.

I know "white knight" is one of those coded insults for "nice guys" among pick-up artists, but I'm having trouble parsing the rest of this. What would I be circumspect about?

Everybody condemning a site where the majority of the victims are young women, and thus "riding to the rescue" of them, while a site where the majority of the victims are men, probably slightly older men, didn't generate the same level of outrage and defense. In this context, "white knightery" is patronizing sexism, defending women because they can't defend themselves, rather than being equally quick to defend all, regardless of age or gender.

In this context, "white knightery" is patronizing sexism, defending women because they can't defend themselves, rather than being equally quick to defend all, regardless of age or gender.

So I can't verbalize my disgust and anger at this guy, because you think I think that women can't defend themselves? Fuck that noise. I have a wife who kickboxes, and who would most likely take out a guy like this if within leg distance before I could even think to resort to harsh language. She can certainly take care of herself, but that doesn't mean that I can't be upset right along side her.

I'm as appalled by this guy and his "business", as I am with this society in general, which would shame people for taking nude photos, or simply for being sexual beings. The shame should be upon those going to the website to watch and judge.

I am therefore not inclined to label Brittain as sociopath -- he's pathological all right, but so is society. I doubt any individual can be as perverted and disgusting as the collective mind inevitably is.